Tag: Love

I guess it’s been exactly a year since I started blogging. I started writing with the intention of gaining some perspective in my life and it totally worked. I’m right and everyone is terrible.

At the start of the year I had my trusty neuromuscular disease which makes it impossible for me to physically care for myself, my mother’s Alzheimer’s had gotten to the point where she could no longer physically or mentally care for herself, auntie had been in my life for a few years helping me try to get her medical help and deal with the endless paperwork x2 that comes with disability. She was the only family member that even pretended to make an effort in my life, but the stress of it was obviously getting to her.

And I was losing my god damn mind so I started this blog.

The major thing I realized is something I already thought I knew; being disabled is like being in a completely different reality that normal people only have some vague sense of, like gravity but really can’t comprehend. What I specifically learned throughout this year, though, is that they willfully remain ignorant because of their narcissism.

That sounds incredibly rude but in some cases I mean it in the nicest way. Some able-bodied people simply never learned that TV isn’t real. When they hear anything about the reality of living a disabled life and how it has nothing to do with your health but everything to do with violent bigotry they try to convince you that any bad situation is an outlier. ABs refuse to acknowledge disability to avoid feeling guilty; those people legitimately don’t know how common and easy it is to step over a dying body while complaining about the smell.

There are some people who genuinely don’t know better and so they are eager to help, impatient for the praise. It’ll get them praise, but they can’t handle it for long.
For my Mormon uncle it was the very minute that I called him to let him know that his sister was sick that he became overwhelmed and he insisted we both be sent to homes. He had no idea why I was so opposed to the suggestion because it wasn’t as if anyone would want to rape me or anything.

I know I heard that clearly because he was screaming it through the telephone.

Auntie pressured me into putting mom into a home and then to make sure I can make no decisions she told them I was mentally ill and all around general liar so I wasn’t allowed to have contact with my mother. After mom got kicked out after week for unruly behavior I found out from the carefully worded discharge papers that she had been raped in the shower. Whether Auntie knew that are not I don’t know but it was the last time I ever saw her.

Up until then, though, Auntie worked incredibly hard to help us but the weight of sainthood became too much. There were multiple times where she would throw my medical cards at me from the end of my bed while yelling at me for not knowing how to love correctly. To her credit, she wasn’t completely wrong.

She said I was being condescending when I constantly apologized for being a burden and then I halted every conversation with the incessant need to thank everyone for just being there. True. It took me being forced into a role-play game before I really understood that.

I like helping people out. I like seeing people relieved and happy when I can unexpectedly provide a solution. I like feeling that I can have at least a slight impact on other people that isn’t horrible.

What I don’t like is people making it weird by being awkward, thanking and apologizing to me every few seconds. When they insist on thanking me it hurts my feelings because it seems like they’re surprised I would do something nice. When people won’t stop thanking me it’s alienating. When someone puts you on a pedestal is not only objectifying but lonely because you’re no longer equal.

What I still don’t understand is what the hell I’m supposed to do.

When I go somewhere I have to get their permission to go. When I do something I have to get their permission to do it. When I eat I have to have proven that I’m worth the waste and produce.

How can I not thank them?

How can I take the risk of not thanking them?

It used to infuriate me and people told me I had no idea what the “real world” was like when the only world they know is Pollyanna’s but now I can’t help but agree. In the real world you don’t have to pretend not to know your friends in public. In the real world you go to the police for help instead of avoiding them. In the real world you don’t apologize to other people when they hit you. In the real world strangers don’t tell you that your God’s punishment on humanity. In the real world you check the mailbox for bills, paperwork to fill out for permission to live for another month.

In the real world a real person wouldn’t have their healthcare taken away for having an extra $100 in the bank, a real person would be allowed to have more than $2,000. Especially if everything was as expensive in the real world as it is here.

Even after a year finally coming to terms with never getting the promotion to human I’m happier than I’ve ever been in my life.

Although I have to fight for it every day I’m still living in my home, unlike my ancestors. Even if I’m not allowed to own it.

Also unlike my ancestors I’m trapped inside my bedroom but I have the technology to talk to people all over the world. Not people from the real world but people like myself who are going through the same things that I am. I never know how long I have them but thanks to the sheer number of us I’m never alone. More and more of them grow exhausted and are forced to commit suicide but it’s a less lonely than it would’ve been even just over a decade ago.

We have the ability to communicate and create things as long as it’s not in exchange for currency and because of that and realizing that there are people in the real world who do care about what’s going on in the outskirts of The Real World™; AB and NT people my age, millennial’s who have helped me survive with much more dignity than any other American generation has before them.

I’ve proofread homework in exchange for dinner. I’ve written essays on Deadpool in exchange for toilet paper. I’ve reviewed movies for hair dye.

I have no hope for society itself but I have hope for humanity now that I know that there are people unlike my family but things haven’t changed enough for me to even have a conclusion to this post. Still, I have the ability to make this post and as pathetic as it is I’m thankful for that.

1. Able-bodied man gets disabled doing sports or during military service, he is paralyzed from the waist down. Able-bodied woman loves him because he’s nice unlike like other guys. He is bitter, she is inspires him. Able-bodied woman knows more about the disabled man’s disability than he does.

2. An able-bodied woman working in healthcare, usually physical therapy, falls in love with a disabled man who has been paralyzed from the waist down due to sports or military. He is bitter, she is inspires him.

3. Single able-bodied mom falls in love with a man paralyzed from the waist down because of sports or the military because he is a nice guy who let’s children ride the wheelchair in his lap.

4. Able-bodied woman reconnects with a man, previously knowing him as able-bodied, but she is paralyzed from the waist down due to sports or military.

5. Able-bodied woman falls in love with a man paralyzed from the waist down due to sports or military despite his disability but then he gets better.

Bonus tropes: the disabled hero is left by his fiancée when he becomes disabled and doesn’t want to fall in love again, the able-bodied heroine is recovering from an abusive relationship

The characters have a romantic and sexual chemistry, if you don’t feel that I don’t know that you really feel what makes it horror. Sang Woo is intentionally handsome, in the most conventional ways just like Bum is even intentionally physically weak from the start.

If there isn’t something between them that you can actually feel the story doesn’t work IMO.

Sang Woo is given a lot of redeemable qualities and what some might justify as “good reasons” for at least some things he’s done in the past. Not only does this make him a three-dimensional character it also makes you empathize with him which is why when Bum thinks that he loves him you believe him. Not that it’s what love should be but that what he feels is real.

You can’t victim blame.

When he reaches a door and hesitates a good writer and artist will keep his perspective squarely in view even without dialogue. Just the shot of him at the door makes your chest tighten and your heart speed up because you feel the emotional context whereas someone who isn’t reading can see the panel and not find it disturbing.

That’s a beauty of horror. It’s subversive in a specific way that makes violence, blood, gore, etc. the least off putting things in the story which is why horror movies are so over the top with all of it or don’t show it at all as in the early Hollywood films. Horror makes you afraid of mundane things, that’s why it works.

This shot from Scream is pretty innocent but it’s an iconic image from the movie. It’s a meme people use to represent the movie in its entirety. No one is being murdered or harmed or even scared. Yet. You can see this in a G rated movie.

That’s horror. That’s why some people are fans of the genre.

So, am I okay with shipping them by putting them in fanfiction that derives from canon, whether it’s an AU or not?

Yes.

Sang Woo is scary because the audience can’t help but love him on some level, even if just in empathy for Bum’s feelings.

If you are a writer, even a fanfict writer, it’s agonizing to not stop the script and end it the best way possible.

If you are a good writer, you wouldn’t be adverse to writing something hard enough to make a happy ending believable.

And if your readers finish your story and feel safe, or calm or happy then you were successful because you were able to subvert the subversive canon by manipulating their emotions so drastically.

It helps that fans love him, even as just as a brilliantly written character, but therein lies the challenge of fanfiction. Can your fix–it actually fix–it better than someone else’s?

It’s a game that people have been playing for centuries and is the reason for most Western canon.